I am not sure if I got you right, but what you want is to create three external hive tables where each of them has exactly 1 file as the data? Or do you need a filename pattern? If you used 'LOAD DATA INPATH...' as a command it is the expected behaviour that it will move a hdfs path into the hive controlled path of hdfs: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/GettingStarted To create the schema based on a file outside the hive controlled hdfs path you need to use the CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE with the json serde and provide the file name as location. If you need a regex as the filename pattern, try using WITH SERDEPROPERTIES ( "input.regex" = "*.json") and provide only the path as the location. ... View more

Off the top of my head try setting hive.warehouse.subdir.inherit.perms=true hive.warehouse.subdir.inherit.perms Default Value: false Added In: Hive 0.9.0 with HIVE-2504. Removed In: Hive 3.0.0 with HIVE-16392 Set this to true if table directories should inherit the permissions of the warehouse or database directory instead of being created with permissions derived from dfs umask. (This configuration property replaced hive.files.umask.value before Hive 0.9.0 was released) (This configuration property was removed in release 3.0.0, more details in Permission Inheritance in Hive) Behavior of the flag is changed with Hive-0.14.0 in HIVE-6892 and sub-JIRA's. More details in Permission Inheritance in Hive. ... View more